It comes with support for YouTube by default, but you can add support for many other sites by installing Comment Snob rules. For each rule that you install, you can choose from the following filtering parameters:

All capital letters

No capital letters

Doesn’t start with a capital letter

Excessive punctuation (!!!! ????)

Excessive capitalization

Profanity

Contains any words or phrases that you deem objectionable.

Installing Comment Snob Rules

There are two ways to install a comment snob rule:

Click on a Comment Snob rule link in a webpage. A bar will appear at the top of your browser allowing you to install the rule. (Try clicking this link: Comment Snob Rule for Mashable)

Or, open the Comment Snob options and write your own Comment Snob rule.

Featured Comment Snob Rules

Writing a Comment Snob Rule

Are you familiar with HTML and jQuery? Then you can write Comment Snob rules for any website you want.

Components of a Rule

A Comment Snob rule is a JSON object that tells Comment Snob how to find comments on a website and where to place the “Show/Hide” toggle for each comment. These are the properties that each rule should (or can) have; all selectors should be written for consumption by jQuery:

Attribute

Required

Description

id

Yes

A string that should be unique to your rule. This is used to make sure that the same rule is not installed multiple times.

label

Yes

A string that describes your rule to a user. It will usually be the name of the website that it filters.

url

Yes

A regular expression (encoded in a string) that describes the URLs for which your rule should be run.

allCommentsSelector

Yes

A selector that selects the smallest possible container that contains all of the comments for the page.

commentContainerSelector

Yes

A selector that selects the largest possible container that contains only a single comment, using allCommentsSelector as a starting point.

commentTextSelector

Optional

A selector that selects the smallest possible container that contains all of the text for a comment, using commentContainerSelector. If not specified, defaults to commentContainerSelector.

commentHideSelector

Optional

A selector that selects any nodes that should be hidden when a comment is filtered, using commentContainerSelector as a starting point. If not specified, commentTextSelector will be used.

statusElementTag

Optional

The HTML tag name that should be used to hold the “Show/Hide” toggle and the reason for filtering. If not specified, defaults to “span”.

statusContainerSelector

Optional

A selector that selects the element that will be used as a point of reference for where the “show/hide” toggle and filtering reason is placed for each comment. If not specified, defaults to commentContainerSelector.

statusPlacement

Optional

One of “prepend”, “append”, “before”, or “after”; used along with statusContainerSelector to insert the filtering status into each filtered comment. Defaults to “prepend”.

statusElementAttributes

Optional

A hash containing name/value pairs for attributes that can be added to the placeholder element specified by statusElementTag.

ajaxInitiatorSelector

Optional

A selector that selects any UI elements that might be clicked to trigger loading more comments via AJAX, using allCommentsSelector as a starting point.

dynamic

Optional

A boolean value (defaults to false) that indicates whether the website’s comments are not included in the main pageload, but are immediately loaded after the page loads. Disqus is the most common example of this.

updateURL

Optional

A URL where the JSON for this rule can be retrieved (for automatic updates).

author

Optional

Your name, email address, or website.

description

Optional

A text description of your rule, only recommended if the label doesn’t fully describe the functionality.

If you’re running Comment Snob 4, it will update the YouTube rule within a few days. If you don’t want to wait, you can go into the Comment Snob preferences, go to the YouTube rule, click “Edit this rule” and replace this line:

And in the preferences (“Contains one of these keywords or phrases”), I add the IP of the troll. However, only the first or the first few comments are filtered and the rest remains visible. Do I need to correct the rule? Or anything else? Thanks a million!

No; the rules have to take into consideration the HTML of each website. If multiple sites used the same HTML (via the same WordPress theme, for example), you could make a single rule apply to both of them by writing the url attribute regex like this:

I was using the default filtering rules for YouTube in those test pages, and selected the “Hide all comments” option.
Today, I installed Comment Snob on a clean Chrome profile and it worked. Then I went back to my usual profile, unchecked “Hide all comments”, and set “Hide comments with at least this many spelling mistakes” to 1, left every exception the profanity filter checked, and the comments were hidden.
There were a few comments with spelling mistakes that weren’t hidden though. Apart from that it seems to be working.
It’s a bit bizzarre, but Comment Snob is working. Sorry for the trouble.

How on earth do things like f**cking and sh*t make it through? Any word that has an asterix in it should be disabled. Also, why would I want to know a bad comment was there? Please provide the ability to completely hide removed comments, I don’t need to know how many immature people there are on the web.

Wow. Just wow. In my humble opinion, this is the greatest extension EVER! Sadly, the level of discourse in comments on the internet has descended well below the level of graffiti on a Men’s Room wall, so, thank you, thank you, thank you, for this marvelous extension!

I have a few questions about making rules. I have a rule that works fairly well on a website called Weasyl, but I’m having a few problems. I can hide the comments, no problem, but how would I go about finding a way to show them, like on youtube, where it shows you why it was blocked and a “click here to view comment” button. Also, how would I go about adding multiple “allcommentsselectors”? This is what I have so far:
}
"id": "weasyl@aldude999.net",
"label": "Weasyl.com",
"url": "^https://www.weasyl\\.com/",
"allCommentsSelector": "#detail-comments",
"commentContainerSelector": ".formatted-content"
}

Okay, forget all of that! I have a new and more frustrating problem. Only the first comment on the page is getting blocked! I’ve tried it on Firefox AND Chrome, and all of them only block the first. I’m pretty sure my rule is right too.

Okay, here’s another bug. I’m trying to install my snob rules from my website, but when I click yes, that I want to install the rule, it just sits there and doesn’t install. It works with the example above, but not on my site. Please fix this bug!

Thank you for this add-on, it’s almost exactly what I’ve been looking for. My one gripe is that you can’t completely hide the existence of filtered comments. This is a big thing for me, even being aware of the existence of the comment annoys me. If it wasn’t for this, I could browse Youtube comments blissfully unaware of the world of stupid.

Yeah I love ya program,BUT it has soem issues on SRW Iron. Iron is a chromium based program as you well know that is the base code for chrome. Still I am having issues with blocking words and phrases. Can you modify the program to accept Iron? Iron uses alot of stuff from chrome its just streamlined. That the only reason its working at all. I need it fixed for youtube. Thanks for your time,and hopefully your help.

Could you please add a filter option to hide comments *without* punctuation? Ie. if there are too many long spans with no commas or periods. A lot of idiots out there create those write-only comments and they definitely deserve to be blocked.

Oh, a bug: it treats comments with no letters at all (like just a time link on youtube, i.e. “50:34″) as all-caps too. My guess is that if it doesn’t see any letters it can recognise, it concludes that 0% (0 out of 0) were lowercase and thus it’s all caps it’s looking at.

Is it, or would it, be possible to support more than one spelling dictionary at the same time, such as “en-US;es-ES”, so that your bilingual and polyglot users don’t have to choose which of their languages gets flagged for “spelling errors”? Thanks for your consideration, and thanks for a great extension!

Hey chris, is there a way that you make a rule that blocks links in the comments section? In other words make it so that comments that have http://, or bit.ly are blocked. I’m not quite understanding on how to make rules.

I don’t know if this can be done, but is there a way that this program can filter out comments from a Facebook user that I’m not friends with (without blocking all together). This person tends to make comments after me of a mutual friend (trying to up one on me). I just don’t want to see her name and her commends. I’ve tried the “Hide” option within Facebook, but that only works with one commend, I’d have to hit the Hide option each time she comments on something.

You could use Comment Snob to do this. Add a Facebook rule that targets the comment *author* as the text (instead of the actual text), uncheck “Use the default filtering preferences”, and put the offender’s name into “Contains one of these keywords or phrases”.

Hi Chris! .. there is this site that i and my friends love very much, but recently “troll” activities started to raise up. we wonder if -comment snob- can hide specific users comments..??
that site is most popular (after youtube) in my country. thousands of people going to be happy if there is a chance.. would u check it up please!?
here is the link…http://alkislarlayasiyorum.com/

This is bullshit.
The comments with bad spelling and punctuation are not the ones we need to get rid off.
The comments that have to go, are the comments by youtubes “top users” that instantly get 100 votes up by their retarded fanboys, and thus stay RIGHT under the fucking video for all eternity…
The youtube comment page is now basically only usable for people that manipulate their posts, and THAT has to change. I REALLY don’t care what PressFartToContinue has to say about EVERY video i watch. This guy is one of the biggest assholes on youtube, needs to die in a fire and i can’t understand how it’s not possible to remove comments from people like that. Youtube is literally fueling a war. You know how “gangs” kill each other because they… i dont even know… think that different things are cool?
I can’t wait to hear news about youtubers getting killed because they are part of the “other bro army”.
Youtube and their top youtubers are doing their best to fuel the hate, and it’s not even possible to watch youtube without seeing the most spammed comments anymore…

Hey, calm down! Isn’t it possible to block users for yourself in YouTube? I don’t know by myself, and I’m not sure if will be notified, if I get the answer here. But if not, it would be a great idea, to implement a user block like function in here!

Hi!
I love the idea of this program, however, I can’t get keywords working. The comments will stay there whether or not they include the word i put there.
I kinda downloaded this program for just that feature, ’cause some channels I have subscribed have their regular commenters who really annoy me. They rarely have any content in their messages, and often don’t even make any sense. And they take space from the actual rational opinions. But since they don’t make any spelling errors, they don’t fit any of the existing categories.

Is it possible to use this to filter out videos posted by a specific person (ideally I suppose being able to filter out videos from a list of people would be better, but for the videos I watch there is one particular person who posts a lot of spam videos that have names entirely unrelated to the video). Thank you.